


Tenacity

by WolfAndHound_Archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Post-Sirius in Azkaban
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 09:25:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5922541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfAndHound_Archivist/pseuds/WolfAndHound_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus during the 'incredibly pissed off' stage of grief.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tenacity

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Lassenia, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Wolf and Hound](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Wolf_and_Hound), which was created to make stories posted to the Sirius_Black_and_Remus_Lupin Yahoo! mailing list easier to find. However, even though I still love the fandom, I am no longer active in it and do not have the time to maintain it. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project in December 2015. I posted an announcement with Open Doors, but we may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on the [Wolf and Hound collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/wolfandhound/profile).

It's really quite funny.

I almost welcome the return to a bleak, meaningless, moment-to-moment existence. Nothing to live for. Nothing _internal_ to live for but the stubborn struggling of an old wolf.

What was life with hope? What was life with the frustrating, endearing, heartbreaking presence of _him_?

I should thank Dumbledore.

Because we weren't happy. It was maddening, watching him grow more morose, more paranoid, day after day. It was wretched to yearn for escape--for him, from him. It was hell to fall into a routine with him again, get comfortable with him again, only to have one of us wake up twitching, untouchable, wracked with nightmares of what had and hadn't been.

The irony is that at first I had been relieved to leave my own family home where it had just been the two of us, jaded and wary, trying to fit ourselves together again around silence and betrayal and years spent apart.

We had been unsure of ourselves then, and our past relationship lay all around us like broken shadows, haunting us.

Then wrenched into another world, from seclusion to society, from the history of who we had been together to who he had been before me, beyond me.

The inability to repair each other's suffering gnawed at us both.

I think we both missed James like never before. James had had the insensitivity, the arrogance, to make problems disappear. It didn't interfere with quidditch, did it? It didn't somehow involve the bewitching Ms. Evans? Then how on earth could it be of any importance? And lycanthropy or the Black family just didn't seem very significant in the light of a bright spring day, when one could still have a ripping social life, when one could still strive with one's House to achieve the Cup.

I disapproved of his cruelty but would not have stopped it; it was a part of him. Reassuring, in a way, that James Potter could have such a flaw--a beak-nosed, greasy-haired flaw names Severus Snape.

Pity is an emotion that does not come easily for me. Harry does not know that about me, but perhaps someday Harry will learn.

Perhaps someday I shall tell him that priorities change when war arrives. James's drive to protect Lily and their son overrode all his other concerns, vanquished any impulse that wasn't heroic. The opposite happened to Sirius and me--insecurities came bubbling to the surface and drove us apart, ruined us.

Sirius and me... Sirius and me... I must be in denial because he's there, in my mind, giving Harry advice right along side me. Sirius really _cares_ for the boy. I simply impart wisdom out of the kindness of my heart. Sirius loves him. I can only look into those troubled green eyes and see mistakes I've made.

Sirius did love him.

Damn it.

Foolish of me to imagine a future, he and I together, some time beyond all of these problems. I should have learned from the last time Voldemort wielded power.

Foolish of me to dream. All those moments when it was bearable, lying in his mother's green silk sheets, the portraits who would have been scandalized having been banished out of sight and hearing. Everything faded and it was just us, enjoying each other, as we have always been able to do whenever we could _forget_ pain and fear and anger and whatever else would distract us from the truth of our love.

I should be grateful. This time around, the memories are genuine. I won't have to think, "Did you lie?" when I recall his touch, his words. I won't have to think, "Was I wrong?" when I recall my own.

No, this time I know for certain what I had and what I lost. Also, why I lost it.

I ignored what I have known since Dumbledore first persuaded me to return to Hogwarts to teach--an individual's happiness is nothing to the man in the face of his cause. _I_ should have looked out for me and mine. But I watched him suffer in that house, deluding myself into believing I was powerless. I failed us.

But Dumbledore destroyed us.

Dumbledore knows he has lost my loyalty forever.

I protect Harry out of sympathy for what he, too, has lost. I fight Voldemort out of revenge.

And I continue. Because it is not hard to go day by day, moment by moment, and thus survive without him.

A werewolf is no stranger to agony.


End file.
